Recovering the Common Good (Part Two)

Recovering the Common Good (Part Two)

A Fellowship of Difference

What story are we living in?

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In the my earlier blog post (see link in comments) I suggested that perhaps one of the deepest problems facing Britain is not simply political division, but the loss of the common good. We have become fluent in the language of rights and identity, but less sure how to speak about responsibility, belonging and the kind of society we hope to become together.

That has left me wondering whether we need to go one step further back.

Before we ask what kind of politics we need, perhaps we need to ask a more fundamental question.

What story are we living in?

Every age tells itself a story. Usually we don’t notice it because we are living inside it. It shapes what we admire, what we fear, what we think success looks like and what we imagine freedom to be. It teaches us who belongs, who doesn’t, and what a life well lived is supposed to look like.

Years ago I came across the work of the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. One of his central insights has stayed with me. Before we can answer the question, “What should I do?”, we first have to answer another: “Of what story am I a part?”

I think he was right.

The stories we inhabit eventually become the lives we live.

The difficulty is that Christians are not somehow immune from this. We can assume we are living inside the biblical story while, often without realising it, we have been formed more deeply by consumerism, nationalism, expressive individualism or the endless pull of the culture wars. We still use Christian language, but the plot has quietly changed.

History offers some sobering warnings.

Before the genocide of 1994, Rwanda was often described as one of the most evangelised nations in Africa. Churches were full. Baptisms were common. Christian faith was woven deeply into public life.

Yet when the killing began, many Christians turned on fellow Christians. Some of the massacres took place inside churches.

Reflecting on that tragedy, the theologian Emmanuel Katongole wrote:

“The blood of ethnicity flowed deeper than the waters of baptism.”

I’ve never forgotten that sentence.

It still unsettles me.

Not because Rwanda is uniquely wicked. It isn’t. Human history is full of examples where Christians have allowed race, nation, ideology or power to become more decisive than the Gospel.

The question, then, is not really about Rwanda.

It is about us.

What story runs deepest in us?

What identity commands our deepest loyalty?

Nation?

Politics?

Class?

Race?

Our denomination?

Our theological tribe?

Or Christ?

None of those identities is unimportant. We don’t stop belonging to a family, a nation or a culture when we become Christians. We don’t stop caring about politics or justice. These things matter because people matter.

But they become dangerous when they become ultimate.

The Christian story begins somewhere quite different from the stories our culture often tells.

It begins not with the autonomous self, but with God.

Not with competition, but with creation.

Not with isolated individuals, but with humanity made in the image of God and created for communion—with God, with one another and with creation itself.

The Bible is remarkably realistic. It refuses to pretend that things are as they should be. Sin distorts every relationship. We become turned in on ourselves. We grasp for power, fear the stranger and find it easier to accuse than to repent.

Every generation tells that story in its own way.

Yet that is not where Scripture ends.

God calls a people.

Not simply a collection of individuals with private spiritual experiences, but a people through whom the nations might be blessed.

When Jesus arrives announcing the Kingdom of God, he does something extraordinary.

He gathers a community that should not exist.

There is Simon the Zealot, carrying all the instincts of revolutionary nationalism.

There is Matthew the Apostle, whose livelihood had depended upon the Roman occupation.

There are fishermen, women who had been pushed to the edges of respectable society, doubters, zealots, hot-heads and people who repeatedly misunderstand him.

It is an unlikely collection.

Jesus does not ask them to become the same.

He asks them to follow the same Lord.

That is something rather different.

The Church, at its best, has always been a fellowship of difference.

Not a community of the like-minded.

Not a gathering of people who all vote the same way or read the same newspapers or share the same background.

A fellowship of difference.

Held together by Christ.

That phrase has become increasingly precious to me because it captures something our culture struggles to imagine. Difference need not end in division. Unity does not require uniformity. It requires a common centre.

I catch glimpses of that at Lighthouse.

Nothing dramatic.

Just ordinary moments.

A retired academic making tea for a man who slept outside the night before.

Someone in recovery praying quietly for one of our volunteers.

A refugee laughing with someone whose family has lived in Yorkshire for generations.

Nobody would design a community quite like that.

Which is precisely why I think it bears the fingerprints of the Holy Spirit.

That is why baptism matters.

Too often we speak about baptism as though it were simply my decision or my testimony. It is certainly personal, but before it is my declaration, it is God’s declaration over my life.

It tells me who I am.

Before I am English.

Before I am Anglican.

Before I am evangelical.

Before I am known by my politics, my profession or my education.

I belong to Christ.

That doesn’t erase every other identity.

It simply means they no longer sit on the throne.

Every Sunday, Thursday for Lighthouse, Christians stretch out empty hands at the Communion table.

We come with different histories.

Different opinions.

Different failures.

Different hopes.

None of us receives because we have won the argument.

We receive because we need mercy.

Week by week the Church quietly rehearses another story. We receive what we could never earn, alongside people we may never have chosen, because grace has always been God’s gift before it becomes our calling.

Perhaps the Church’s first contribution to the common good is not another strategy or another public statement.

Perhaps it is simply becoming more fully itself.

The Church does not exist to prove that Christians are right.

It exists to make the Kingdom imaginable.

That is a high calling, and we have often fallen short of it. We have baptised nationalism. We have baptised ideology. We have mirrored the divisions of our culture when we should have offered something different. There is much for us to repent of.

But repentance has always been where Christian hope begins.

If we are ever to recover the common good, I suspect it will not begin with Westminster.

For Christians it will begin in ordinary churches.

Around ordinary Communion tables.

Among ordinary Christians learning, often falteringly, to become a fellowship of difference.

That has never been easy.

But then, the Church has always believed that the Holy Spirit can make one body from many people.

Perhaps it is time we believed that again.

Rev’d Jon Swales,

July 2026